


Otherworld

by Kes



Series: Thor 2 Rewritten: The Shaded Tree [6]
Category: Thor (Movies)
Genre: Alternate Universe - Canon, Asgard, F/M
Language: English
Status: Completed
Published: 2014-08-07
Updated: 2014-08-14
Packaged: 2018-02-12 05:42:37
Rating: General Audiences
Warnings: No Archive Warnings Apply
Chapters: 4
Words: 5,211
Publisher: archiveofourown.org
Story URL: https://archiveofourown.org/works/2097771
Author URL: https://archiveofourown.org/users/Kes/pseuds/Kes
Summary: <blockquote class="userstuff">
              <p>Heimdall smiles. “Welcome to Asgard.”<br/>...<br/>Above, behind, all around are the stars – alien stars, stars she’s never seen before, stars she burns to map and observe and understand. Jane Foster is in Asgard, and the circumstances, she discovers, could hardly be worse.</p>
            </blockquote>





	1. Chapter 1

When Jane wakes up, it’s raining and she feels... different. Hungry, but not for food; something is snarling inside her, and she is cold. For a second she doesn’t remember where she is. Leaky roof, plain brick walls, miscellaneous bits of plastic – the warehouse! She had seen the truck, and the unbelievable anomaly in the stairwell (if you left something to fall there and the anomaly didn’t vanish, would it ever need to stop?), and then the obscurometer had shown another one forming, which she had found. She had found it, she had taken the stick and started to go through, and then...

If only she could remember it. She had gone through to Somewhere. Space? Another world? Another dimension? There had been gravity, an atmosphere probably – though if she had passed out, perhaps not one friendly to human respiratory systems. Life forms? Could this be a pathogen? Could she have brought a legitimate alien pathogen back to Earth? ( _I should probably quarantine myself..._ ) The obscurometer is blank, no readings; just the aftermath of whatever had brought her back.

She scrambles upright, the strange vicious emptiness inside her growling at her quiet acknowledgement that perhaps the people who said that following your gut was all well and good as long as you actually watched where it went could have had something of a point. The voices of the others have stopped, but the ‘exit’ signs have been left and finding the parking lot again is easy. The daylight hurts as she steps out into it.

Outside, Darcy is looking dubiously at her phone and consulting with Ian, worry clear in the lines of her shoulders. “Darcy!” Jane calls.

“Jane! What the hell? We went all over that warehouse looking for you, where have you been?” Before she can say anything, Darcy looks her up and down, scowls, and adds, “You went through one of them, didn’t you?”

“That’s your immediate conclusion? I mean, it’s true, but –”

“Come on, it’s you, I should have got it at least two hours ago –”

“I’ve been gone for two hours?”

“Three, actually.”

Ian lopes up, looking vaguely apologetic. _Does he ever look anything but?_ “We were going to call the police. I said we should have earlier.”

“What the hell? Don’t you even think? We call the cops, they arrest us for trespassing, then they call – they call the feds and they cordon everything off and we never get any access.” There’s something niggling at her about this parking lot.

“All right! We didn’t do it.”

“Good!” Suddenly she realises what it is. The rain is actually quite heavy, and yet they’re not wet. It’s not falling around them. There’s water flowing in towards them, but only from the sides. “What the...”

Darcy looks around. “That’s weird. You bring anything weird back from The Mysterious Portal To Somewhere?”

“Well,” she starts, but by then she has it figured. She was wet in the warehouse, so it can’t be her. That established, the most likely reason is – there he is. The snarling inside her clenches, seizing her own feelings and scouring at the edges of her in their currents. She shoves the obscurometer at Darcy and strides towards him, all her thoughts moving too quickly for her to catch.

“Where have you _been_?” she’s yelling, even before she reaches Thor. “You said you were coming back!” Suddenly she’s angry, and she reaches up to slap – _stop!_ “Sorry, I – it’s been two years! You were in New York!”

“I am sorry, Jane – the Bifrost was destroyed, war and chaos erupted across the Nine Realms and –” He does not say that he had not dared. “The wars stretched long.”

“As excuses go, it’s not – terrible. But you could have emailed, if SHIELD has a working computer which I know for sure that they do.”

“But I did!” Or rather, he had asked Coulson to. Presumably it had been lost with him.

That stops her in her tracks. “I wish I had my notebook.”

“What notebook?”

“A Full And Complete List Of Things SHIELD Has Lied About So Far.”

“I see.” Watching her through Heimdall is nothing like actually talking to her – why had he not come sooner? He has missed her, and become so used to it he has forgotten. “Jane, where were you?”

“Where was I? In Tromso, it felt like SHIELD were trying to put me in a fridge –”

“No, I mean a moment ago, Heimdall could not see you, could not even hear you.”

“Ah.” She feels the heat creeping up her neck. But no matter how defensive she feels, if anyone might know about what kinds of things you might pick up in outer space, it’s Thor. “I’m studying gravitational anomalies and stable portals – at Erik’s request, it’d be nice if he showed up – and we found several, and I tested the other side out for basic conditions but I don’t remember what happened when I went through, maybe the atmosphere was bad for me. Anyway, there’s something – something off, I feel wrong, like there’s something inside of me.”

As she talks, his face gets more and more concerned. “I do not know anything of that, perhaps... May I..?” He gestures at her hand.

Why would he kiss it again now? “Sure,” she says, but all he does is touch it. There’s a jolt inside her, like something is trying to move, and she grabs it and hauls it back with all her might. They spring apart. “What was that?”

“I do not know, but it is not of Earth and I do not know it.” It’s not inside him, he thinks, that feeling is fear alone – he has just reached her again and now – not her as well, for all she is mortal he thought they would have more time –

“Did it get you?”

“I do not think so. Jane, the only thing I can think of is to ask the healers of Asgard.”

Everything goes slow. “Asgard?” she asks, a smile slowly forming on her face, and she doesn’t notice the other two scuttling through the rain until Darcy speaks.

“You’re going to Asgard? Also, Thor, can you stop raining everywhere?”

“Oh. Sorry.”

“I wanna come,” Darcy adds, and reaches out for Jane.

“Don’t touch me!” she nearly screams, but it’s too late. Darcy touches her arm and – nothing happens. “It must only do skin to skin.”

Thor’s stomach clenches harder. Skin to skin, hand to hand – the places where the life flows close to the surface. It’s not possible, but – “We must go now, Jane. And I can only take one. My apologies,” he says, and nods to the unknown man as well.

“Can’t we drop back and pick up some equipment?” Jane asks, but she can feel the urgency tearing inside her. “I’m taking this, anyway.” She grabs the obscurometer hand unit back from Darcy, and pats her jacket for what she privately calls the Book. “What do I do?”

“Just hold on,” Thor says, pulling her in close. She has forgotten how big he is. “Heimdall?”

Now it’s excitement that’s making _It_ move inside her, and she looks up eagerly for the flickering colours.

Lightning crashes, and the incredible, overwhelming beam of bright blue-rainbow light strikes with earthshattering force. The light hurts more than she could ever have expected, but she still keeps her eyes open, feels rather than sees the cosmic web flying by. It’s unbelievable, bewildering, she feels almost stretched, but on they hurtle and for all the Bifrost’s astonishing force she feels only a strong head wind. Fear forgotten in favour of exhilaration, she laughs, and only laughs more fiercely when she catches Thor’s concerned glance downwards giving way to a slow smile. The obscurometer in her pocket is beeping away at the corner of her hearing, but most of what she hears is the strangely muffled roaring of the stream of pure dark energy.

And then, all of a sudden, it’s over, and Thor is setting her down in a golden chamber wreathed with lightning. “We have got to do that again,” she says, heart leaping, a thousand ideas buzzing in her brain and drowning out her sudden faintness. A glance takes in the details of the room, the concentration mechanism that looks for all the world like a large scale version of the one she used for her portal tests back when SHIELD still let her do things like that, and the huge man in golden armour at the centre. “Hi,” she says, the fact that she has agreed to come to a place where everyone voluntarily walks around in armour slowly sinking in.

He smiles. “Welcome to Asgard.”

“Nice to meet you,” she says, and takes the smile as encouragement. “Is this a large version of a spin concentration chamber?”

“Jane, we have to go to the healing room.”

“It is,” Heimdall answers. “But Thor is right.”

Reluctantly, she follows him out, and has to stop for a moment to gape. They stand on an arrow-straight, ice-smooth bridge rippling with rainbow light and held up by great golden towers, and at the other end of it a pair of huge gates are swinging closed as a small carriage starts to advance down the bridge towards them. To either side seas race over a precipice, and the air is heavy with salt spray. Above, behind, all around are the stars – alien stars, stars she’s never seen before, stars she burns to map and observe and understand. The sky is more than half wisps of cosmic light, as though nebulae were very close by, and there is a gas planet with rings lighting Asgard as the moon lights Earth.  
At last she tears her attention from the heavens, and looks towards the land of Asgard. Before her stands a great city, dominated by the shining spires of a building that rises from the ground like organ pipes. Steep mountainsides and waterfalls enclose it, and the tall, grand buildings seem cramped by them.

“This is Gladsheim,” Thor says as they walk to meet the carriage. “The city of my fathers.”

“And I only showed you my trailer.”

“You showed me much more than that.”


	2. Chapter 2

Before it is anything else, Asgard is alien. The carriage that trundles out to meet them is shaped more like a boat than a carriage, and when the driver unhooks the horse from its harness it retracts neatly and appears at the other end of the vehicle. As they get in, a set of panels rise up to provide a covering, though she can still see out of the sides. At every turn of the wheels there is something new and more marvellous.

To the right, as they leave the long bridge, there is a spire, half-hidden behind a colossal garden, its parts rotating in an endless dance of flickering lightning and flashing gold in the bright light from the planet overhead. Everything here is bewilderingly large and shining, and the camera on her phone is woefully inadequate for the job she’s asking of it. “What is that?” she asks, itching to find out with her fingers.

“That’s the tower of the Artificers. They brought it from Valaskjalf and they have to repair it constantly because it doesn’t fit properly on their Guildhall here. Next to it is the Silversmiths, and they have filed three petitions to various courts to have it removed already.”

Suddenly Asgard does not seem quite so alien. “How does it work?”

“Well, officially it’s a trade secret. Unofficially, I would guess a network of shifting magnetic poles controlled by a cogwheel mechanism with a few interesting tweaks,” he says, and adds, “I cannot get you a permit to have a look at it.”

“How did you know that was what I wanted?” She can feel the grin spreading on her face, and the strange feeling – now changing, turning shivery, and every cold breeze that catches them is raising goosebumps – seems less important.

For the first time since they met again, Thor’s face loses its haunted look as he smiles back. She is looking at Asgard as though it is a wonder to be beheld, understood, and then marvelled at some more. It’s not quite how he had seen her looking up at the stars, that yearning, that reaching, but it has enough of that in it to remind him that to her, this is the stars. “I have missed you.” He reaches out for her hand, and stops just in time.

“You’re the one with the Einstein-Rosen Bridge,” she says, and perhaps she sees his face fall because she adds, “No, I understand. When there’s turtlefish from the ass-end of space everywhere, keeping in touch is tough. I don’t even have that excuse, and I haven’t answered my emails for months.”

“Not all of them were turtlefish.”

“Were any of them Hutts? Xenomorphs?” _This is like the flying monkeys again._ “Sorry, I just – when everything calms down, I’ll show you. They’re from films.” She grins nervously – the memory of her cramming dirty dishes into the overhead cupboards crosses his mind.

“I will be glad to see.” A gust of wind flaps their hair in their faces and dusts snow onto his cloak and he suddenly realises she is shivering. “Are you all right?”

“Yeah, I’m – no, it’s caught up with me and I’m getting shivery. I’ll be fine.”

There are always blankets in these carriages, as long as she doesn’t mind the smell of horse. He has to open two of the underseat lockers to find it, but find it he does. “I am sorry for the smell.”

With a shrug she takes it from him, careful not to touch his fingers, and pulls it around herself. It’s warmer than any horse-smelling thin sheet has any right to be, and she rubs a corner between her fingers, feeling her ignorance about textiles. Soon enough, though, her attention is captured by an intricately woven golden fountain, all gold and green waterweed and shining jets of water. It is set at the head of an avenue of dozens of statues, old and weatherbeaten but still grand and imposing with their great spears and stony cloaks, and they pass it by. “Who are those?”

“Before the Bifrost was built, this was the main route from the sea into Gladsheim. Some of them are my ancestors, but most of them are their warriors.” Thor stares up at them with a strange look on his face. "They are intended to intimidate visitors."

She doesn't say that they work. “There's things like that on Earth too. But these are older than most, I suppose.”

“Far older. The most recent statues in Gladsheim are those of my father at the start of his reign, over three thousand years ago. This city was abandoned for Valaskjalf soon after he married my mother.”

History has never been an area of interest for Jane, but she realises that for alien history, she’ll make an exception. She always did wonder why the protagonists of so many science fiction stories asked so few questions. “Why’d you come back?” she asks as the carriage stops and the panels swing back out of their way.

Thor helps her down and thanks the driver before answering. “After I – after I left you last time, the Bifrost was broken and part of the rim broken; it could not be rebuilt at Valaskjalf. So we returned here to put my grandfather Bor’s Bifrost back into working order, and reinhabit the old city.”

They have been travelling the stars for thousands of years. The thought makes her feel so small that she simply nods and looks around.

The palace also makes her feel small. It’s not the size of things – she’s seen taller skyscrapers – it’s the age, the grandeur, the technology, the sheer strangeness. Nothing on Earth looks like this.

Even inside, the grand open spaces don’t stop. They enter at a small wing near the foot of one of the outermost flutes, past two guards whom she stiffens at the sight of but who merely hold their spears aside at the sight of Thor, and a huge stairwell looms above them. “Don’t you people have elevators?” she says, quailing at the thought of climbing them all, and he smiles.

“Here, we do.”

Next to the wall, there is a large, decorated square on the floor. Once they are standing on it, with no visible means of control, the sides rise into benches and the whole begins to slide up the wall. Abruptly Jane sits down inside the centre square, clutching her blanket tighter. Whether the hollow, weak feeling is _It_ or just the shock of the last few hours, she isn’t sure. They rise higher and higher, and Thor stays crouched next to her; she’s glad of that at least. When they had met, the territory had been firmly hers, and that had helped to bridge the strangeness even when he had come striding out of the storm, born anew. Here, it would be so easy for him to align himself with his home… “This time I’m the fish out of water,” she says.

“You have made a better showing of it than I did.”

“There’s still time for me to get hit by a horse or something.” 

He chuckles. “I hope not.”

“How far up do we go?” They have passed three openings in the wall already, with distances between them so huge that she wonders what the rooms beyond were like.

“Most of the way. The healing rooms must be high up, so that they have clean air, roof gardens, and sunlight. Though I think they will take you to the examinations department, which is fully enclosed to prevent interference.”

That sounds uncomfortably like a hospital to Jane, who has never liked having doctors’ appointments. She falls silent, watches the golden walls sweep by, and forgets to ask about Asgardian pollution.


	3. Chapter 3

At first, the healing rooms are a blur of grey-gowned women with elaborate hairstyles, braziers and being told to ‘hush, and come along,’ every time she insists that she did not get this on Earth – she soon learns to say Midgard – and that there is definitely something wrong. It takes Thor growling something about life energy channels and another terrifying moment of having to drag _It_ backwards from another connection to demonstrate to get them to take it seriously.

Eventually someone shakes her head and says something like, “Better warm up the Soul Forge,” to a younger woman, and things abruptly quieten down. (Jane has a brief moment of panic – _I don’t want my soul forged!_ \- but apparently it’s an imaging technology.) “We’ll understand it in no time,” someone assures Thor, and they are led into a room lit with golden light and a white-glowing table. “Get up, lass,” someone else says to her, and slowly she does. By now she’s been divested of the blanket and given a long sleeveless coat to wrap around herself, which is both warmer and less smelly. It’s too long, though, and she keeps tripping over the bottom.

Above her the machine leaps into life, and she sees orange lines floating in the shape of her body. More than ever, she wishes that she was a biologist as well. They don’t look like any system she knows, though Thor’s talk of life energy, life force reminds her of qi and mana. Surging within the orange lines is something red, something she knows instantly is _It_. The machine has – “Is this a quantum field generator?” she asks, heart leaping. As it does, she sees the orange lines twitch, like her excitement of recognition has registered on their instruments.

“It’s a Soul Forge,” the dour head healer says dismissively.

 _Why would you call an imaging device a forge?_ “Does a Soul Forge transfer molecular energy from one place to another?”

The woman looks down at her with an expression of surprise and, she thinks, warmth. “Yes.”

Even the reality of her alien infection floating above her can’t contain the grin. “Quantum field generator!” Maybe she can make friends with them and get to have a look at it. Maybe she can eat an apple of youth and spend eternity here making friends with everyone and examining everything. Maybe –

She overhears the end of what one of the junior healers is saying to Thor, and the moment passes.

“...not survive the energy surging within her,” the woman says, and Jane feels terribly, horribly sick. For a fraction of a second, the idea of pressing her fingers to those of someone else, anyone else, and not hauling _It_ backwards crosses her mind, but it is only a fraction of a second. Maybe they can cure it, or find a vessel to put it in. Anyway, to force it on someone would be murder. She focusses on that fact to stop her mind screaming that it isn’t _fair_ , she doesn’t _deserve_ to die! _You would if you murdered someone else with it_ , she tells herself sternly.

Her thoughts are interrupted by a loud, authoritative cough and an old man in what looks like half armour striding in, barking, “Are my words mere noises to you that you ignore them completely? Or was there another reason? I told you, you were absolutely forbidden to bring her back!”

“We have a duty to protect! She is ill, Father, and it is not of Earth –”

“She is mortal, illness is their defining trait. If we brought every sick primitive here, the planet itself would sink, and mortals die so quickly we would never have time to dispose of the bodies.” He sniffs. “She even smells of horse.”

Thor blurts out about the blanket, but Jane is furious. She doesn’t care whether it’s _It_ or not; she hisses, “How dare you? What gives you the right to –”

He almost matches her contempt. “I am Odin, Allfather, king of Asgard and protector of the Nine Realms. Do not speak to me of right.”

“Well, I’m Doctor Jane Foster,” she replies, and refuses to back down, though she does refrain from adding, _and you aren’t my dad or my king._

To her disgust, he simply ignores her. “Thor, I will speak to you later. Guards, take her back to Midgard.”

Thor is protesting, the guards are closing in, _It_ is rising inside her on the tide of her own wrath and she grits her teeth, world fading in a roaring surge of red. The explosion is perfectly still inside her, even if it leaves a deep feeling of _wrongness_ in the pit of her stomach, and she opens her eyes to see the healer, Odin, and Thor’s faces peering concernedly down at her. (Thor, alone of the three, asks if she is all right.) Odin runs a hand along her arm, careful not to touch it, and she can just see the pulsing red inside. It is oddly familiar.

“Impossible,” he whispers.

(Jane’s mind fills in, _You keep using that word. I do not think it means what you think it means._ )

“What is it, Father? The healers only know that it – that it is killing her, if it stays. It does seem to be willing to jump, though not to return, so perhaps –”

Jane, Odin and the healer surprise each other by chorusing, “No!” in near-unison, though she would have put a sizeable amount of money on their motives being different.

For a second, Odin looks at her, and she thinks she sees a little bit less contempt in his face. “Come with me,” he says, and strides off, leaving her to scramble off the table. Thor takes a piece of unidentified cloth from one of the healers and places it between them as he helps her down.

“I do apologise,” he says quietly. “Are you going to be all right?”

 _Of course not, I’m literally dying!_ she thinks with a slightly hysterical edge to the thought, but she knows what he means. “I’m treating him like a tough examining board, I can handle this.” After all, she has spent her entire academic career defending ideas thought improbable, sometimes on no sleep and even once a hangover. This _is_ worse, but not _inconceivably_ so.


	4. Chapter 4

The first thing Jane sees when she walks into the library is Yggdrasill, wreathed in stars. She stops dead, leaves crackling underfoot, and stares. It is the largest tree she has ever seen – and they are nowhere near the ground floor – and in its branches are patches of light, arranged in a wonky line up the trunk in the branches. She starts to walk towards it, blinking away her tiredness, but Thor coughs. “It is only a representation. Come on; Father has not stopped.”

With yet another item on her ‘to investigate,’ list, she hurries after him through a library of unfamiliar form. Instead of shelves and shelves full of books, with separate reading areas, they are hastening through a maze of innumerable curved lines of slanting desks, their surfaces at standing height, each with a shelf underneath and a book chained to it. Odin chooses one and hauls an enormous tome, bound in red with a golden symbol emblazoned on it, onto the desk.

It is filled with incomprehensible patterns that shift and move in bright gold and vivid ink, and Thor leans over his shoulder, mouth moving as though they hold meaning. Odin shakes a hand, and they are replaced with runes. “Look,” he says to her.

The page is beautiful, but it holds no meaning for her. “I can’t read runes,” she says.

“They use a different script now,” Thor adds.

Odin huffs disapprovingly, and begins reading. The book turns to pictures, which shift as he gestures.

“Long ago, before the birth of light, there was darkness. And from the darkness came the dark elves. During the reign of my father Bor, they and their leader, Malekith, tired of the light and sought to extinguish every light and return to their old place. They were to do this through the power of the Aether. Now, you will not know this, but the Nine Realms are not eternal. They had a dawn, as they will have a dusk.”

(Jane’s fingers tap impatiently.)

“But there are things that are. Six – relics, that predate the universe, artefacts of awesome and terrible power. Most of them appear as stones, except for the Aether. It is uncontained, free flowing, and in our universe, it seeks out hosts. It feeds off their life force, consuming them from the inside out, and moves on; its power is abrasive, destructive. As a result, it can tear the universe apart, if it can reach it. Every five thousand years an event called the Convergence occurs. During this time, the Nine Realms line up, and the Aether could touch and blacken all of them. This was what they sought to do, but Bor was there to stop them in his capacity as protector of the Nine Realms. The cost in lives was horrific, but it came to battle on Svartalfheim, the dark elves’ world, and Bor managed to rip the Aether from Malekith, and ensure that the dark elves would never threaten the universe again, ushering in a new era of peace and prosperity.”

“What happened?” she asks, although she thinks she already knows the answer.

“He killed them all. As for the Aether, this text records that it was destroyed. It was not. It was buried deep, somewhere no-one would ever find it – until you, days before the Convergence.”

Anger sweeps through her and she has to haul back the Aether again. She steadies herself, leaning on one of the desk, as Thor protests that it would have been found by someone.

“Why hide it away, anyway? It could have been studied and kept safe.” She supposes it’s only like the dumping of nuclear waste in rusty canisters in the ocean, but it still makes her angry, especially since the Aether is of much greater scientific interest than the average mass-produced lump of radioactive metal. Besides, the average tin of radioactive waste isn’t actively killing her, right now, because someone didn’t contain it properly. “I didn’t exactly go looking for it, I was investigating this Convergence phenomenon. Anyone could have got there, and Heimdall can’t see it.”

Odin is scowling at her, and she reminds herself that if she’s dying anyway, she doesn’t have to be afraid of him. “Some things are best left alone.”

“Did you? All this, and the information about the Aether, and the Bifrost – came from someone not leaving things alone.”

“But there are limits! Some things are beyond you.”

“Why?” Jane snarls. After his comments about primitive mortals, she knows the answer – but she wants to make him say it.

“Father – is there anything about removing it from a host?”

Both of them turn to glare at Thor, but he is right. That information is the priority. “No,” says Odin. “The Aether will sometimes transfer itself from person to person, but it will not move from a person to an artefact. The dark elves are known to have done it, since that was its state when Bor retrieved it, but we cannot.”

“Perhaps if it were shared between people, so that no-one had it long enough to kill them?” Thor suggests, and she nods. Smiling is beyond her at the moment – her heart is racing – but she wants to support it.

“I told you how powerful it is. Sooner or later, one with the ability and will to wield it would flee with it and wreak havoc.”

“But they would soon die.”

“There is a lot of harm to be done by the dying,” Odin answers, looking at Jane. _He’s still trying to intimidate me._ “I told you, no. We will comb the stars for the receptacle she fished it out of.”

Hope surges inside her. “Will that – save me?”

“No,” he answers, turning away. “You will not last that long. We can only hope to stop it taking another host before we find the container.”

Until he is out of sight, she stays upright, despite the shaking, tearing feeling inside her – all the worse after the confrontation – out of spite. Once he leaves, though, she flops against the desk and lays her head on it, choking back tears. _Not here._ Suddenly all she wants is ice cream and sleep. “I guess you don’t have ice cream here.”

“I am sorry, Jane.” They both know that it is not just about the ice cream. Thor feels like uprooting the entire library, down to the tree, and then screaming at his father, but instead he lays one hand on Jane’s shoulder, feeling her warmer than she should have been through the cloth.

“A bed, then.”

“The palace is too small for the court alone, and you wouldn’t like it anyway.” He doesn’t himself, and he knows that if he found her some small, out of the way bed here she would have no peace for the string of gawpers coming to see a woman from Midgard. “But the Thrudvangar lodge is empty, and you will be safe and well guarded there.”

“Sure.” She is too tired to care much about what Thrudvangar is.


End file.
